My sister Madeline is studying in Heidelberg this year, which is just two hours from me in Stuttgart. She came to visit this weekend – So what do you think these two college students got up to? We trashed the apartment… Because we’re young, we’re dumb, we’re having some fun! We’re staying up til midnight with the sewing machine on!
When the weather’s nice, I ride my bike everywhere I go. However, when I tried biking in my new maxi skirt, the skirt was so full that it got completely tangled in my bike chain. Finally, after lots of testing, I came up with a solution. I’d like to share it with you now, so here’s a quick tutorial.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted, so I want to catch you up on some of the things I’ve been sewing in the intervening months. The first one is this new maxi skirt that I made this summer! Of course, when I say “new,” I mean something new refashioned from something old. If you know me, you know that I never like to toss an old piece of clothing if it has potential left. This dress is from H&M – I picked…
Right now I’m working on a dress inspired by this dress that I found at Promod. When I saw it, I knew I had the perfect fabric at home for the accents at the neck and on the sides – a home decor fabric left over from a maxi-skirt I made in high school. I wasn’t sure if I had a matching lightweight fabric for the rest of the dress, but serendipitously, I found a few yards of lightweight brown fabric in my stash!
Today’s my birthday! I’m a quarter of a century. Makes a girl think… And I have a newly refurbished old skirt to wear! I first sewed this skirt up about ten years ago out of scraps from my mom’s fabric stash. The sewing was really messy (anybody heard of a straight hemline? 15-year old me hadn’t!) and the fabric was of such different weights that it didn’t hang right. To fix this, I underlined the thin…
‘d been tossing around the idea of teaching sewing, so I decided to try out an idea I had for a beginner’s project. I thought that stuffed monsters might be an easy project that also allowed for a lot of creativity. I came up with the idea because I started sewing by making stuffed animals using printed fabric like these pigs. I remember struggling to follow the curves properly, but I liked that the stuffed toys…
Hi there, I’ve been away for an inordinately long period of time. I don’t have much of an excuse either, though a lot has changed since I last posted. I moved cross-country to Stuttgart from Berlin at the beginning of this month and have been very busy setting up the apartment and organizing my sewing space – a challenge, since I just have a corner of the living room. I’ve been sewing merrily away…
Here’s my latest refashion – I picked up this skirt while I was home in California for Christmas. It’s from Target’s fall collection this year, but I got it at the Goodwill because it was slightly damaged. It was also a size 16, which was great – it gave me some extra room to get a little creative. I forgot to take a picture of the skirt before, but thanks to the power of Google, I was able to find a photo of it on…
Do you remember the vest that I was refashioning from an old coat? I finally finished it! And as you probably recall from my first post, it was inspired by men’s vest styles of the 19th century. So as you can see, I’ve decided to celebrate by acquiring Napoleon’s old office and converting it […]
It’s getting close to the holiday, and I’d like to share this recycled Christmas garland I made last year. I wanted something to hang a few ornaments from, but I didn’t have money to spend, so I came up with this cheap and easy decoration. It’s made mostly out of scraps of old sweaters and a cereal box! I drew the poinsettia petals in sharpie on the back of the fabric, cut them out, and glued them onto…
